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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Vulnerability Management Engineer

💰 $ - $

SecurityCybersecurityIT Operations

🎯 Role Definition

The Vulnerability Management Engineer is responsible for driving an organization's vulnerability and patch management program end-to-end. This role identifies, analyzes and prioritizes security vulnerabilities across on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments; validates remediation activities; integrates threat and asset context to reduce organizational risk; and provides actionable measurement and reporting to technical and executive stakeholders. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise in vulnerability scanning tools and remediation workflows with strong stakeholder management, reporting, and process improvement skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Security Analyst with exposure to vulnerability scanning or incident response
  • Systems Administrator / Systems Engineer who managed patching and system hardening
  • IT Risk Analyst or Compliance Specialist with hands-on remediation experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Vulnerability Management Engineer or Vulnerability Lead
  • Vulnerability Program Manager or Security Operations Manager
  • Director of Security Operations or Head of Threat & Vulnerability Management

Lateral Moves:

  • Incident Response Analyst / Threat Hunter
  • Security Engineer (Cloud, Network, or Application)
  • Cloud Security Engineer / DevSecOps Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the day-to-day vulnerability identification process by scheduling, executing and validating authenticated and unauthenticated scans across corporate networks, cloud accounts (AWS/Azure/GCP), virtual environments, containers, and mobile endpoints using tools such as Tenable (Nessus/Tenable.io), Qualys, Rapid7, and open-source scanners.
  • Triage vulnerability findings by analyzing CVE details, exploitability, CVSS scores, business criticality, asset value, and threat intelligence to produce prioritized remediation recommendations and risk-based SLAs that align with the organization’s risk appetite.
  • Design, maintain and tune vulnerability scanner configurations and credentialed scan profiles (Windows AD, SSH, API integrations) to reduce false positives and ensure accurate asset coverage and reporting.
  • Integrate vulnerability data with CMDB, asset inventory, and discovery tools to normalize identifiers (IP, hostname, asset ID, cloud instance ID) and ensure accurate mapping between findings and business owners.
  • Drive patch and remediation campaigns end-to-end by coordinating with system, network, cloud, and application teams; create and track remediation tickets in ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira) until closure and verification.
  • Implement and manage continuous vulnerability monitoring pipelines for highly dynamic environments (containers, ephemeral cloud workloads, CI/CD) and integrate scanning into build and deployment workflows.
  • Validate remediation actions through rescans and verification playbooks; confirm resolution, assess regressions and escalate persistent or risky exceptions to engineering and leadership, documenting compensating controls when necessary.
  • Build, maintain and improve vulnerability metrics, dashboards and executive reporting (MTTR, time-to-remediation, open vulnerability aging, SLA compliance, top assets by risk) to inform leadership decisions and program performance.
  • Conduct root cause analysis on recurring vulnerabilities (e.g., configuration drift, missing baselines, unpatched dependencies) and partner with engineering teams to eliminate systemic issues through automation, hardening standards, and developer education.
  • Maintain and operationalize a vulnerability acceptance and exception process, including risk acceptance forms, approval workflows, periodic re-evaluation and expiration controls to enforce discipline and accountability.
  • Provide subject-matter expertise for penetration tests, red team exercises, and third-party security assessments; ingest external findings into the vulnerability program and validate remediation.
  • Develop and maintain runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), playbooks and knowledge base articles to scale repeatable vulnerability management activities and enable on-call or adjacent teams.
  • Collaborate with Application Security and DevSecOps teams to introduce vulnerability scanning for container images, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) templates, and application dependencies to shift remediation earlier in the software lifecycle.
  • Perform asset risk modeling and exposure analysis for high-risk vulnerabilities and coordinate emergency response efforts for critical CVEs, including cross-functional communications, hotfix deployment, and public-facing disclosure handling when applicable.
  • Manage third-party scanning and vendor security assessments to ensure that partner/third-party exposures are identified and remediated in accordance with contractual security requirements.
  • Work closely with compliance, audit and legal teams to provide evidence of vulnerability management activities, control effectiveness and remediation timelines for internal and external audits (SOX, ISO, PCI, SOC2).
  • Automate repetitive tasks (ticket creation, scan orchestration, reporting exports, remediation verification) using scripting (Python, PowerShell) and orchestration tools to increase program velocity and reduce manual error.
  • Conduct regular tabletop exercises and training sessions with operational teams to improve remediation throughput, decrease time-to-remediate, and align responsibilities across Dev, Ops, and Security stakeholders.
  • Evaluate, recommend and pilot new vulnerability tools and technologies (SCA, container scanners, orchestration tools, threat intel feeds) that close coverage gaps and increase program effectiveness and automation.
  • Maintain and develop integrations between vulnerability platforms, SIEMs, orchestration tools (SOAR), and ITSM systems to ensure consistent incident handling, alerting, and automated remediation workflows.
  • Provide direct mentorship and technical coaching to junior vulnerability analysts, creating hiring profiles, interview guides and onboarding materials to grow the team’s capability.

Secondary Functions

  • Support security architecture reviews to ensure secure default configurations and vulnerability-resilient design patterns are adhered to across new projects and cloud deployments.
  • Assist in vendor risk management activities by validating third-party security posture through scanning reports, remediation evidence and risk acceptance reviews.
  • Participate in cross-functional working groups to define acceptable risk thresholds, patch schedules, and business-impact windows for remediation activities.
  • Produce training materials and conduct awareness sessions for IT and developer teams on vulnerability prioritization, patching best practices, and secure build pipelines.
  • Provide on-call coverage for critical vulnerability events, coordinate emergency patching, and act as the escalation point for unresolved high-severity findings.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proven experience with vulnerability scanning platforms: Tenable (Nessus/Tenable.io), Qualys, Rapid7 InsightVM, or similar enterprise scanners.
  • Strong understanding of CVE, CVSS (v2/v3), EPSS, and other vulnerability-scoring methodologies and practical experience applying risk-based prioritization.
  • Hands-on experience with patch management tools and processes across Windows, Linux, macOS, network devices, and cloud-hosted workloads (WSUS, SCCM, Jamf, Ansible, Chef, Puppet).
  • Familiarity integrating vulnerability data with CMDB/asset inventory tools and ITSM platforms like ServiceNow and Jira for ticketing and lifecycle tracking.
  • Experience with cloud security and scanning in AWS, Azure and GCP including knowledge of cloud-native services, IAM, and cloud discovery methods.
  • Competency in container and image scanning (Clair, Trivy, Aqua, Snyk) and securing CI/CD pipelines with SCA (Software Composition Analysis) and IaC scanning (Terraform, CloudFormation).
  • Proficiency in scripting and automation (Python, PowerShell, Bash) to automate scans, reporting, remediation verification, and API-driven integrations.
  • Familiarity with SIEM and SOAR platforms (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel, Demisto) to enrich vulnerability data with telemetry and orchestrate automated playbooks.
  • Experience consuming and operationalizing threat intelligence (MISP, commercial feeds) to contextualize exploitability and prioritize actionable remediation.
  • Strong reporting skills using BI tools or dashboards (Tableau, Power BI, Grafana) to create executive-level and operational vulnerability risk views.
  • Knowledge of secure configuration baselines and hardening frameworks (CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs) and experience remediating configuration-based vulnerabilities.
  • Understanding of regulatory and compliance requirements (PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) and how vulnerability management supports those controls.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to translate technical vulnerability data into business risk language for executives and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills to drive remediation across distributed engineering and operations teams without direct authority.
  • Proven problem-solving and analytical mindset to assess complex multi-faceted risk scenarios and develop pragmatic mitigation paths.
  • High attention to detail, documentation discipline and the ability to maintain consistent processes at scale.
  • Prioritization and time-management skills to handle competing remediation campaigns and critical incident responses.
  • Collaborative mindset with experience working in Agile and cross-functional teams (DevOps, Cloud, Network, Application Security).
  • Resilience and composure under pressure during emergency patching or zero-day events.
  • Coaching and mentoring aptitude to grow junior team members and improve organizational vulnerability hygiene.
  • Continuous learning orientation and curiosity about emerging threats, tooling and vulnerability research.
  • Customer-service focused approach to internal stakeholders while balancing security objectives and business continuity.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, Cybersecurity, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Assurance, or related discipline and/or professional certifications such as CISSP, CISM, OSCP, GIAC (GMON, GCIH, GREM), or vendor certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Information Security
  • Network Engineering / Systems Administration
  • Information Technology / Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of hands-on experience in vulnerability management, security operations, or systems administration with demonstrated ownership of scanning and remediation programs.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of experience managing enterprise vulnerability management programs, with demonstrable achievements such as reduced mean time to remediate, automation of remediation workflows, or successful cross-functional remediation initiatives.
  • Prior experience in cloud-native environments, containerized workloads, and integrating vulnerability management into CI/CD pipelines is highly desirable.
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